Just how big are porn sites?

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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a fast internet connection must be in want of some porn.

While it’s difficult domain to penetrate — hard numbers are few and far between — we know for a fact that porn sites are some of the most trafficked parts of the internet. According to Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner, which tracks users across the web with a cookie, dozens of adult destinations populate the top 500 websites. Xvideos, the largest porn site on the web with 4.4 billion page views per month, is three times the size of CNN or ESPN, and twice the size of Reddit. LiveJasmin isn’t much smaller. YouPorn, Tube8, and Pornhub — they’re all vast, vast sites that dwarf almost everything except the Googles and Facebooks of the internet.

While page views are a fine starting point, they only tell you that X porn site is more popular than Y non-porn site. Four billion page views sure sounds like a lot, but it’s only when you factor in what those porn surfers are actually doing that the size and scale of adult websites truly comes into focus.

We’ll start by laying the ground work, and then on the second page we have some real world figures from YouPorn, the second largest porn site on the web. If you like, take a moment to try and estimate the amount of traffic that YouPorn handles every second. Let us know in the comments if your guess is anywhere near.

Scale

The main difference between porn and non-porn sites is the average duration of a visit: For a news site like Engadget or ExtremeTech, an average visit is usually between three and six minutes; enough time to read one or two stories. The average time spent on a porn site, however, is between 15 and 20 minutes.

Then you need to factor in that most websites are predominantly text and images, while the largest porn sites push streaming video. When you load the ExtremeTech home page, you’re talking about a couple of megabytes, and then maybe 500 kilobytes if you load an article. When you stream porn, assuming a low resolution of 480×200, you’re looking at around 100 kilobytes per second — which, over 15 minutes, is around 90 megabytes.

Then you need to multiply 90 megabytes by the number of monthly visits — which is around 350 million for Xvideos. This comes to around 29 petabytes of data transferred every month, or 50 gigabytes per second. To put this into comparison, your home internet connection is probably capable of transferring a couple of megabytes per second, which is about 25,000 times smaller.

In short, porn sites cope with astronomical amounts of data. The only sites that really come close in term of raw bandwidth are YouTube or Hulu, but even then YouPorn is something like six times larger than Hulu.

Infrastructure

Serving up videos requires a lot more resources than plain text and images, in terms of storage, CPU cycles, internal I/O, and bandwidth.

While it obviously varies from site to site, most adult sites will probably store in the region of 50 to 200 terabytes of porn. This is quite a lot for a website (only something like Google, Facebook, Blogger, or YouTube would store more data), but in a world where 2TB drives are cheap and plentiful, this isn’t ultimately a very large amount. Last year we wrote about a Backblaze storage pod that can store 135TB in a 4U case, for just $7,400.

CPU cycles and I/O will be a function of the bitrate of the streaming video and the number of page views. First the porn site has to serve up a dynamic, searchable database of thousands of videos, and then, when someone clicks on a video, that file needs to be read from a hard disk and streamed over the internet. If you’ve ever transferred a lot of big files over a local network (i.e. stressed both your hard drive and Ethernet port) you will know how taxing this is.

Actual hardware requirements are almost impossible to derive (they’re not publicized), but in the case of a large porn site we’re probably talking about racks of quad-CPU servers, gigabit switches, and load balancers. Software-wise, most large porn sites will use a very-high-throughput database such as Redis to store and serve videos, and a light-weight HTTP server like Nginx to serve up the web pages.

Finally, bandwidth. Referring back to our Xvideos example (based on an Ad Planner estimate), a large porn site will have to have enough connectivity to serve up 50 gigabytes per second, or 400Gbps. Bear in mind this is an average data rate, too: At peak time, Xvideos might burst to 1,000Gbps (1Tbps) or more. To put this into perspective, there’s only about 15Tbps of connectivity between London and New York.

There are only so many ways of coping with this much traffic: You set up your own data center, rent a few racks in a very large data center, or use a cloud provider like Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure.

Hell about half of the internet is furries. And the other half is hentai-loving weeabos. And the third half is hentai-furries.

Disney and Japan have a lot to answer for.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Curiously enough, every time I include a ‘furry’ Easter egg, a bunch of furries come out of the woodwork :P I’m starting to think that I’m a bit of a rock star in the furry fandom world, or something…

http://greenreaper.co.uk/ Laurence ‘GreenReaper’ Parry

No, we just run big websites. Including furry porn sites! *waves*

joedoakes202

Porn built the Satellite industry . . . I know a guy who took a one way ticket to the Soviet Union . . . he led a very interesting life . . .

:)

http://www.facebook.com/ProfessorArchibald David Koen

Porn was banned in the Soviet Union, possession resulting in a moderately large fine and distribution resulting in forced labor.

Momo

What realy added to the article IMO is the “furries” search term in the Google search box :P

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

That was for you! yiff, yiff!

Guest

“To put that 800Gbps figure into perspective, the internet only handles around half an exabyte of traffic every day, which equates to around 50Tbps — in other words, a single porn site accounts for almost 25% of the internet’s total traffic.”

Anonymous

The quote doesn’t make sense, considering that 800Gbps is much less than 25% of 50Tbps (it’s 1.56%). Or am I missing something?

http://profile.yahoo.com/7H7SJBHUGI3YO2RX7LP6NUTHXY karlej

lmao realy 800gbps thats a home pc and i’m damn sure its not what they run they have huge infrastructure’s and data proscessing units

http://profile.yahoo.com/7H7SJBHUGI3YO2RX7LP6NUTHXY karlej

lmao realy 800gbps thats a home pc and i’m damn sure its not what they run they have huge infrastructure’s and data proscessing units

http://profiles.google.com/ekirpichov Eugene Kirpichov

I’m sorry, what kind of home PC do you have that can serve 800gbps of traffic? It’s 100 gigabytes per second, which is about 1000 times more than the read spead of a regular hard disk.

I appreciate the deep research he did. I know a lot of people are tight lipped about this subject, and sebastian is working hard to get inside this issue and really show it from a new point of view.

Gregory Speck

I loved that quote. And your comment. I’m sure he had loads of help on this one. A whole gang of editors, waiting for him to come with the copy, smiling. I’m just this is “just the tip” of the iceberg.

I appreciate the deep research he did. I know a lot of people are tight lipped about this subject, and sebastian is working hard to get inside this issue and really show it from a new point of view.

Anonymous

Whilst I one handedly applaud your efforts Jude I think a little nod to The Huns’ Yellow Pages is in order for servicing us so well until you were up and running ;)

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

No problem — thanks for the help :)

Maybe we can work together on another story in the future? Maybe, like, I can come out to California and report on the technology used in the actual production of porn?

http://blog.youporn.com YouPorn Jude

Good idea, only YouPorn doesn’t produce it’s own porn. :)

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

I’m sure you could set me up, though, right?

http://blog.youporn.com YouPorn Jude

Anything is possible. If you want to shoot me a pitch email sometime with an idea I’ll circulate it around for you.

http://profile.yahoo.com/7DPYW2BSUF5M4IDYC3PSYW7CYE Mark

Geekporn….

Anonymous

If the writers from the Big Bang Theory TV show don’t pick this article and do a show around it they should be forced to act in the porn version!

Anonymous

Now you’re talking – porn with one guy who can’t stand to touch anyone and another who can’t talk to women.

That said, if there *was* such a thing, it’d be an easy way to get my wife to watch porn. I swear I’ve seen her watch one episode of Big Bang Theory on the Tivo and one on her netbook, at the same time. Did you know that there are YouTube rips of Big Bang Theory with Arabic subtitles? Well, there are.

Now you’re talking – porn with one guy who can’t stand to touch anyone and another who can’t talk to women.

That said, if there *was* such a thing, it’d be an easy way to get my wife to watch porn. I swear I’ve seen her watch one episode of Big Bang Theory on the Tivo and one on her netbook, at the same time. Did you know that there are YouTube rips of Big Bang Theory with Arabic subtitles? Well, there are.

http://www.cookiesfromthedarkside.wordpress.com MichaelL65

…And touching us….

http://geek.com sal cangeloso

Thanks for the help Jude. This was great.

http://blog.youporn.com YouPorn Jude

Any time. If you guys would ever like to do another story, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

For the same reason that Big Business determines the course of Congress regardless what is actually good for the citizens of the country, you don’t think the major media companies are going to let ALL porn go away, do you? Viacom, Verizon, AOL…follow the money. Enron spun off little companies that were losing money and gave them names like “Chewco” to mask them and sound esoteric. All of these corporations have subsidiaries and conglomerate partners that are making money on some angle. Just think about the TV feed in a hotel, for starters. Bush tried during his tenure (especially under John Ashcroft, a guy so prudish he had to have $16,000 worth of drapery to cover the breasts on the statues in the Dept of Justice), and then under Gonzalez tried to claim he was especially interested in “extreme” sites. Let’s all just put this out there and call it fact: This country needs demons. Yes, some demons motivate people to get off the couch: A citizen will be more likely to take off his shoes at the airport if he thinks he’s playing some role in stopping Al Queda from the next 9/11, but at a more simplistic level, people sleep better at night if they think they are a “good” person. And the best way to tell whether or not you are a “good” person is to point out to everyone else (while screaming at the top of your lungs to make sure they all pay attention) is how BAD some other guy is. I mean, tax evasion is peanuts if the guy next door has got child porn on his hard drive, right? And it’s only one shiny thread from child porn to any other porn, because of the “it leads to harder drugs” theory. Ergo, you still get the nasty looks from some citizens when they see the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue – or the cover of Vogue for that matter – because they all know that ultimately…….eye makeup leads to child sex slavery.
And if you need me to map out the path from one to the other, may i refer you to the Monty Python sketch about how to tell whether or not a woman is a witch…it’s all the same sketch. Everybody needs to know there is a demon right next door, both because they can tell everyone they aren’t that demon, and keep everyone all exited and worried that the big, bad, demon is going to get them next if they don’t join the cause. George Carlin said “You show me a guy (touching himself) in his own basement and I’ll show you a guy who isn’t causing any trouble”. If only America could have elicited the kind of interest and vigilance for financial chicanery and malfeance that we can stir up by screaming “PORN!!!!!”, then maybe we might get somewhere productive. But no, America would enjoy the spectacle of burning what they are sure is a witch and build a monument around the charred remains of what they are sure is destroying society before they have the courage to go after any real dragons….because catching dragons would require real courage, AND would require enlisting the help of all those guys in the basement that they think are the real problem.

Anonymous

I remember, back in the days before WWW, our sysadmin estimated that about 30% of all IRC traffic he randomly sampled was sex-related, the same as the article estimates now, a full 20 years later.
I propose we call it the “I want more”‘s law: no matter how large the internet grows. 30% of it will be reserved for pron.

Anonymous

YouTube and Hulu are mentioned as websites that require a lot of bandwidth. What about Netflix? Any idea where it ranks in terms of traffic?

Anonymous

YouTube and Hulu are mentioned as websites that require a lot of bandwidth. What about Netflix? Any idea where it ranks in terms of traffic?

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Netflix apparently uses a LOT. There was a report that said it uses 30% of peak time bandwidth, but I don’t know how accurate that was.

I think it depends on how you measure that ‘traffic volume’. In terms of raw bandwidth, I’m fairly sure that Xvideos is in the top 10 or 20. In terms of reach, porn sites generally peak around 50-100th (as shown by Alexa/Ad Planner).

Oliver Smith

for one thing, you are comparing YouPorn’s *peak* time bandwidth with total internet daily bandwidth for the day as if it was evenly spread, which we know it isn’t.

Oliver Smith

for one thing, you are comparing YouPorn’s *peak* time bandwidth with total internet daily bandwidth for the day as if it was evenly spread, which we know it isn’t.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_RMI5ZQQNYTWQZHNH2IUC5GMK74 Anupam Sharma

First 3 lines of this article are quite impressive :)

http://geek.com sal cangeloso

We’ve been exploring the affinity between the readership of ET and Jane Austen for some time now.

I’m not a huge seeker of porn, but I “get it” – and I believe that people are just stymied in their basic needs & adventurism (repressed). Denying it & demonizing it doesn’t change anything. It’s a fail to deny- like the tired idea that women don’t want sex (& so many women taught that it’s wrong for them to even admit their own desire)…it gets perpetuated through our laws & cultures/societal ideas. Look at the monumental press on gay rights & secular equality, as an example? If we were free to explore ourselves, our psyche, a lot of the aggression would disappear, I think.

We all want & like sex- but it is the afore-mentioned that kills the buzz, so to speak?

I guess the best thing is to talk to your SO about what you want or want to explore? Oh~ & don’t judge?

Imho…

Anonymous

Who denied or demonized anything here? You appear to be replying to a comment that wasn’t made or a position that wasn’t taken by anyone…

Yep, as mentioned above, I’m not entirely sure how they got to those figures (and it’s North America only, not worldwide).

Is Netflix really that big? I mean, YouTube is MUCH larger than even the largest porn sites, and it has hundreds of millions of users. Netflix has something like 20 million users…

Anonymous

You’ve got to remember the difference between Netflix and YouTube; most people will watch a 3-5 minute in highly compressed 480p on YouTube whereas on Netflix, it’s 90-120 minutes of 720p video. Huge difference in bandwidth. If that’s US figures it’s very plausible.

Anonymous

You need to remember that there is still an order of magnitude more people watching YouTube videos at any given time.

The overall length of the video doesn’t matter. The quality aspect DOES make a difference however.

Take a home NAS for instance. Use it to stream multiple 5 minute clips at once, and then compare it to just one 90 minute movie. I think you’ll find that 5 simultaneous small clips impacts performance far more than one large clip would.

Max Renn

How big… Difficult to penetrate…hard numbers… This article is like an old smutty British sitcom :)

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

My Britishness shines through! Hooray!

http://profile.yahoo.com/7DPYW2BSUF5M4IDYC3PSYW7CYE Mark

ISP- Internet Sex Provider, lol

http://profile.yahoo.com/7DPYW2BSUF5M4IDYC3PSYW7CYE Mark

ISP- Internet Sex Provider, lol

http://www.facebook.com/people/Jeff-Nolan/567846457 Jeff Nolan

For an interesting comparison you should look at internet dating services… which in terms of revenue and unique visitor traffic is bigger than porn, in the U.S. specifically.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Jeff-Nolan/567846457 Jeff Nolan

For an interesting comparison you should look at internet dating services… which in terms of revenue and unique visitor traffic is bigger than porn, in the U.S. specifically.

Anonymous

I think one day world would understand that porn sites have put our progress years behind.

Anonymous

I think one day world would understand that porn sites have put our progress years behind.

t mathews

porn distribution has DRIVEN tech advance.

https://plus.google.com/101785462960818953428/posts Wilson Phillips

I agree. Most people only know the recent Internet. For those of us who have been around from the beginning, we understand that.

Nowadays, we take internet shopping for granted. Almost everything can be bought online. In the beginning, there were no standards for the credit/debit card transactions. That’s were the porn industry came in. They hired the smartest programmers they could find. Those guys wrote the code to allow the sites to charge their customers.

At that time, each site required you to download a browser plugin to securely handle the transactions. As newer browser versions arrived, they came with standardized ways to encrypt and handle the transactions and the downloading of plugins disappeared.

Once this was proven to work, then and only then did we see brick and mortar businesses start putting up their online stores.

Yes. Porn built the Internet as we know it.

http://profile.yahoo.com/Q5RAHVFCEOXOXJAE4QB3OZJEEU Michael Chavez

I have fiber optic cable to my home. No, I don’t traffic porn sites, never heard of youporn, and don’t have an interest. The assumption people only want high speed Internet for porn is ridiculous and it comes from a warped “Kinsian” mentality. Drug addicts think everyone wants drugs. Likewise, porn addicts project their proclivities on others.

Anonymous

So if you are not into porn it must be for pirating movies, musics, software, etc…

Anonymous

I’m pretty sure the “assumption” was a joke. I’d say “lighten up” but it sounds like that isn’t going to happen any time soon.

http://profile.yahoo.com/Q5RAHVFCEOXOXJAE4QB3OZJEEU Michael Chavez

I have fiber optic cable to my home. No, I don’t traffic porn sites, never heard of youporn, and don’t have an interest. The assumption people only want high speed Internet for porn is ridiculous and it comes from a warped “Kinsian” mentality. Drug addicts think everyone wants drugs. Likewise, porn addicts project their proclivities on others.

http://profile.yahoo.com/Q5RAHVFCEOXOXJAE4QB3OZJEEU Michael Chavez

I have fiber optic cable to my home. No, I don’t traffic porn sites, never heard of youporn, and don’t have an interest. The assumption people only want high speed Internet for porn is ridiculous and it comes from a warped “Kinsian” mentality. Drug addicts think everyone wants drugs. Likewise, porn addicts project their proclivities on others.

As to the article, that is some serious bandwidth usage and when you combine the porn is 30 percent of the traffic with botnet traffic, you soon realize that unless we get a handle on the bots, there wont be enough traffic for us normal users.

Anonymous

Wow another 10 minutes of my life wasted on porn

http://twitter.com/Kiljoy616 Alexander Cardosa

Porn good but video conference much better. Watching movies also, maybe that why we need more bandwidth.

Anonymous

I’ll have you know that some of us can last, er um view a porn site longer than 15 minutes. :lol:

But seriously, one thing that cannot be overlooked is the contribution of the porn industry to the tech we currently have. They are, in large part, the driver for newer tech, faster speeds, etc…

Anonymous

They are so big that they single-handedly changed culture…..anal sex and no hair. Because punters paid more for that.

Anonymous

Read a little history, both were quite common, pre-Victorian.

http://www.moviein3d.net Caitlin

One the reasons for very large porn sites is that some of them pirate material from the original sites, in reality there isn’t that much porn when you factor that, and if one day they take all copyrighted material down there will be very little left.

I am not going to point fingers at anyone because everyone knows who the pirates are, a visit to their site will tell you.

Xvideos and all those tube sites are run by cyber-criminals that steal content from legitimate producers and it’s free so of course they get huge traffic. C’mon! User-generated content? Bulls**t.

Anonymous

Just glancing at the xvideos homepage I notice a big ad banner at the bottom of the page for Brazzers. It would seem that the legitimate content producers dislike tube sites so much that they pay them big bucks to host their ads!

30%? And just one single site accounts for 2% of all the data transfer in the world?
And Rick Santorum and his followers thought they were going to make it go away?This is a very revealing statistic. I would like to know how this translates into actual
usage by number of people.

Anonymous

Several years ago I saw an estimate that porn accounted for 1/3 to 2/5 of all Internet traffic, so if that was accurate and the present 30% is accurate, it means porn distribution is actually in decline. Proportionally speaking.

Anonymous

Or other traffic is growing — which follows the porn-and-tech model for earlier technologies like VCRs and DVDs.

Anonymous

Several years ago I saw an estimate that porn accounted for 1/3 to 2/5 of all Internet traffic, so if that was accurate and the present 30% is accurate, it means porn distribution is actually in decline. Proportionally speaking.

http://twitter.com/realitychecknet RealityCheckNetwork

Great article, Seb!

Just to give everyone an
idea of what it takes to successfully run a large website that generates millions of
impressions per day. Here is an overview of our server configuration to successfully
manage a website 200+ million impressions per day:

Thin Application – Each subset
of the application resides on a different set of servers allowing separate
systems to fail without taking down the site – such as comments can be broken,
search can be broken, media can be broken, but the website still loads

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Wow, cool — thanks for the input!

What are you encoding?

Do you think YouPorn would have encoding servers, which take DVDs and rip them to H264?

http://www.blackxino.blogspot.com Xino

15-20min to w@nk on Youporn…

Lewis Watt

Umm in the screenshot the last searched for term in Google was ‘furries’. Just sayin’.

http://twitter.com/lamoscacojonera La mosca cojonera

Some wrong data? typo? Numbers don’t make sense…

“YouPorn hosts “over 100TB of porn”,(…). All told, this equates to an average of 950 terabytes of data transfer per day,”

http://www.desiedition.com/ Raz

these facts are hard to believe but that is how it happens

Anonymous

Thanks for the article, it’s an apropos and informative glimpse into the size of some of the architecture behind the web’s tremendous volume. A further angle is the security. There are multiple moving pieces. Even within the tech part of the industry, components to hosting may be in multiple countries, each with their own idiosyncratic legal, administrative challenges to business, protection and litigation.

A for instance, and timely this week, a member of the team here used youporn and the live link on its toolbar. Never signed up, thus could never have left comments or data beyond whatever IP footprint, yet, has witnessed an other commentator, in the ‘live chat’, posting with a handle, name, nik containing 7 and more characters, letters, in sequence, which are portions of a very unusual proper name used in/from a gmail account accessed on the team computer. So, Arnold is viewing porn and sees a live chatter, or a room, called Schwa**!!hegger. Does Arnold blanche? Would you? Is this what cyberbullying looks like?

Heard of such saucy hacking? Kinda psyc-op creepy. They said it it was only youporn and cam4 and only just this last week, March/April.

There is a ‘never sign up policy’ on the computer, and exclusive use for porn limited only to those two sites.

So how did the/these bully/bullies get the name? very active triangulation? or within the very specific databases cam4 and youporn’s toolbar link operates? or have they crept into the team computer?

The bully appears in multiple rooms as a chatter, exhibiting the unique name/code, or, as the ‘label’ to their room.

The bully appears proficient or mother tongue English, while the other chatters in the room had little English( The cam4 spambully used the name/code for a room label, no cam appeared to link.)

Other than the visual spambully in ‘live’ viewing no other spam or effects have been apparent. Except, that the usual spam is turning from sex-based products to urgent calls for job interviews in northern Italy; I imagine we all get those these days.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Thanks for the story!

Yeah, the porn industry pretty much pioneered every kind of aggressive advertising. They were the first to use pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash ads, those chat boxes…

Pretty scary, in this case :)

Anonymous

We need to get these things on an .xxx master level parent domain and out our kid’s internet space.

Anonymous

No, you need to realize the Internet was not created to babysit your children. Many of us are sick and tired of parents bleating that the rest of the world needs to bow and scrape to the issue of your reproductive tract.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_U6LT4AWDWIZGCLZH2RCMXEZRCY Josh

i like porn

http://profile.yahoo.com/S3DB47OXC54LAPPF3RKDY26CNI stuart

Jane Austen would be so proud to know she’s still being cribbed nearly two centuries after her death.
Good article.

You could have at least added a NSFW tag to this filthy, filthy article Sebastien!

http://www.linkedin.com/in/daviddrinkwater demodave

Wait. You mean the fact that the title of the article (which you must have clicked on in order to be able to comment on it) has the word “porn” in it was not enough for you to make an intelligent decision about whether or not you felt it was NSFW?

As M_! indicates above, the internet is not here to baby-sit you. You need to make your own decisions. Ant the atticle itself isn’t particularly filthy. Unless somehow statistics turn you on. I’m a geek, so I’ll admit that they do. :p

Anonymous

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a fast internet connection must be in want of some porn.” There are many good reasons to have high speed internet besides porn. The main reason is because low speed internet sucks. There are others too. Porn is just a bonus imo.

Aeyeaws (none)

porns more like 60% of the internet traffic

Anonymous

The article you didn’t read, puts it at 30%.

Andre LaPlume

the comment you didnt read. its not 30% thats low, its more like 60 %

http://www.facebook.com/bcroner Brian Edward Croner

Porn software specialists, network engineers, and business execs are said to wear 3-piece suits. Before hearing this I used to imagine a porn site owner as an unkempt, unshaven, overweight dirtbag wearing a wifebeater.

http://greenreaper.co.uk/ Laurence ‘GreenReaper’ Parry

No, that’s a *furry* porn site owner. Though I draw the line at wifebeaters. :-)

http://profile.yahoo.com/2JFIAAFSGAHIAGCOBWTSRTEKDQ George

OK. I’d always wondered about that. It’s absolutely incredible. Best analysis I’ve seen. And the point missed is how many naked women are in 100TB of data (and, technically, guys)?? I mean, where to do they come from. Or am I just naive (rhetorical question…)?

Anonymous

Everything works out fine till you factor in the amount of time spent on reading news stories like this one about porn, and then everything get skewed! I mean I myself spent more than 10 minutes on this not counting comments! BTW isn’t all porn geek porn? I mean really

Anonymous

Great article – now what about the bottomline? Does anyone have an idea about the $$$ generated by international porn industry and the rate of growth over the last 20 years. Also would be interesting to see growth trends and shifts of ever expanding client base?

Anonymous

A porn revenue article would be interesting to say the least. Does anyone know the preferred revenue model for porn sites?

Anonymous

right now I buy media (banners) on a certain porn tube for around $0.33 per 1000 impressions (times showed) first seat (top bid). You can get a rough idea how much they might make per ad spot
keeping in mind placements and CPM costs vary depending on which country the visitor is from

The server and bandwidth bill however is in the $xxx,xxx range

To get idea for porn revenues you’d have to ask a credit card processor for the data, many porn sites barely stay in the black or don’t have a lot of customers. Other than paysites there are also phone sex lines, tv channels, magazines, dvds (which are dieing), sex toys…

Anonymous

Great article – now what about the bottomline? Does anyone have an idea about the $$$ generated by international porn industry and the rate of growth over the last 20 years. Also would be interesting to see growth trends and shifts of ever expanding client base?

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_WIJJPIKMKO4ECPNB54UAMQCZGI Jane Marek

It is all the moral Christian Americans surfing the porn. Right before and after they attend Easter services.

Anonymous

I saw an interview with the guy who owns Private, and he said the biggest selling outlet they had was a store just outside the Vatican.
I’m not sure if it’s true, after all Private only makes straight porn.

The Internet is porn and school girl gossip sites. In other words, the vast majority of the web is worthless.

Anonymous

Sorry, for the most part, a really bad article. 1) I know the author put a lot of work into the research, and I commend you on a lot of it, but major tech error and hence all your math is bad. B=BYTE b=BIT, 8 bits=1 byte, everything (for the most part) in the computer biz is B Bytes when referring to storage, BUT when doing telecom it is in bits. Hence, your 100kbps is 12KBps. SO redo all the math & extrapolations on your soapbox, it’s off by a factor of 8. 2nd) Terrible opening statement that is extremely pejorative opinion & clueless. The porn industry did indeed foster the early Internet growth in a major way (more than people like to admit) by having a supply & demand pressure for fast internet when there was otherwise little content of interest to the public, but after the nascent rise everything requires a decent speed – dialup is for dinosaurs. Your bio looks full & you been doing tech all your life, great, but I’ve been in this for a living since before you were born when we had 8-bit processors & 1200 BAUD modems.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Woah, if you’re going to attack someone, you better make damn sure you get your facts straight.
I don’t get what you’re attacking? I say that low-quality video is roughly 100 kilobytes per second. (It’s about 800Kbps, which as you know equates to 100KB/s). Do you really think that video can be streamed at 12 kilobytes per second…?

You would NEVER say ‘KBps’. You would say KB/s. bps is bits per second (originating from the modem era) — Bps doesn’t exist.

The opening sentence is a re-working of the opening sentence from Pride & Prejudice, a fairly famous book.

I would’ve thought you’d be slightly better at this kind of thing, if you’ve been doing this for longer than I’ve been alive.

Anonymous

The funny part is that some of us read “1200 baud modem” and think, “Geez, kid, you had it easy.”

ASCII-art porn delivered over the 300-baud acoustic-coupler modem still stashed in my closet, from Compuserv at $2.95/minute, now THAT’s old…

Interesting video. Reminds me of the fun I had building my first website connected to a Sun server using a brand new 2400 baud modem. This was back in 1993 or 94. Times have certainly changed. At that time there were less than 1000 web sites in the world … and no porn.

Anonymous

Obama’s going to take them down.

Anonymous

Let’s not pretend that people actually think porn is bad. Want proof? All of the real problems in society, from unwed mothers to child sex slavery are themselves used as headlines and taglines to sell everything from TV programs to a seat in the pew at the local church. All of the “good” organizations in America would be bankrupt tomorrow (and bored) unless they had something “bad” that they were chapions at standing against. They are all using porn as advertizing for their cause dedicated to “exposing” the problems. From TV programs that sell advertizing space to all of the “good” companies that want to be aligned against such things, to the megachurches that talk about music videos with sexy scenes as if they were rocket launchers from Al Queda, people pretend they’re against the porn itself – but if it went away tomorrow, they’d be unable to gather a crowd for any other legitimate reason.
Anyone remember Joe Scarboro’s MSNBC show when it was in primetime? With the same frequency that MSNBC runs prison shows now, Scarborough would have a “SHOCKING” expose on some form of sex slavery, prostitution, porn.In order to gather a crowd with pitchforks and flaming torches, you first need a witch. Dont’ kid yourselves, if all these “evils” went away tomorrow, don’t think the same people chasing it would suddenly be able to smile and think things are going to be all right – they’d invent some other demon by dawn the next morning. Nobody goes to church for the bake sales, they go because they fear their mortal soul is in danger. Because America needs something else to be worse so we can fool ourselves into thinking that we’re better by comparison. Porn is a relatively safe dragon to be perpetually slaying compared to all the real dragons that ruin lives in so many other ways, only without the leather and high heels.
Does anyone think that girls would be doing porn if they could make that kind of money working as a bank teller, or the receptionist at a doctor’s office, or even as the owner of their own gift card and flower shop? So maybe rather than constantly bleating about the horror that porn is, let’s all shine some real light on how crappy the rest of our fate has to be which makes people turn to something that supposedly has so much to be frightened of. I bet we won’t see that article.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/daviddrinkwater demodave

We wouldn’t “see” that article, because no-one would bother to click the link. Sad isn’t it.

(I’m not disagreeing with you.)

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

I can’t tell if your last sentence is somehow a slight on this story…

I agree with the other stuff though!

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

I can’t tell if your last sentence is somehow a slight on this story…

I agree with the other stuff though!

http://profile.yahoo.com/7H7SJBHUGI3YO2RX7LP6NUTHXY karlej

women just dont seem to care about themselve’s any more its like why take a chance on being with a man and have sex for free when they can make big money for it

Anonymous

Perhaps the length of time spent on each visit relates to the time it takes the
average person to “release their buildup”.

Anonymous

But how much of the livejasmin traffic is animated pop-under ads?

You can’t click on porn on the net without getting livejasmin pop-unders.

Anonymous

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a fast internet connection must be in want of some porn….”
Not really true. I just “speed tested” my connection at just over 50Mbps… and that’s what I get for paying $25 per month for internet… in Lithuania, the backwards former-soviet republic. And it’s better than 98% of the rest of the world.

Then again, I could assume many people are using it for porn here, since the tax on pornography is about 80% (price of product AND postage cost applied), and no “real” porn, such as Hustler, et al, is even allowed to be sold in the country.

I guess porn is the “proving ground” for all future tech applications.

Anonymous

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a fast internet connection must be in want of some porn….”
Not really true. I just “speed tested” my connection at just over 50Mbps… and that’s what I get for paying $25 per month for internet… in Lithuania, the backwards former-soviet republic. And it’s better than 98% of the rest of the world.

Then again, I could assume many people are using it for porn here, since the tax on pornography is about 80% (price of product AND postage cost applied), and no “real” porn, such as Hustler, et al, is even allowed to be sold in the country.

I guess porn is the “proving ground” for all future tech applications.

Dennis Yar

i am looking for someone who can design a large scale system like youporn but for a social enterprise.

Will be using aws, node.js mongodb, redis

Please let us know if you can help us.

Thanks

dennis

bb cr tt (at) gm ail dot c o m

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_WWKRBN4OT6HH3QG6VGHZU7HU24 Dick FNCheney

So much porn, so little time.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1836161760 Johnny Johnson

“The Devil in the Wire”

It comes at you in many forms
The evil in the wire, it rides like a storm
It cuts your soul like a million knives
The lustful eye, the devils disguise

The clock of time it races by
Technological wonders fill the sky
You will never know how it will come
Evil gets inside your soul, then it haves it fun

http://www.androidreviewblog.com/ omurphy

I’d be curious to see what type of ad conversions porn sites like xvideos, xhamster etc. see compared to espn, cnn or youtube.

I would think they’d have to generate some pretty decent ad money in order to pay for all those data centers.

http://profile.yahoo.com/MTMAH7UKUPLWYWMTNRQBDO6F2A Don G

Not that I frequent these sites or anything but…it’s not an accurate gauge of a site’s popularity when the user had no control over whether the site pops up or not. JAmine.com is a prime example. I’ve heard from other people that when they open a link to one site, Jasmine opens up, too.

harold lloyd

Throughout the history of new media, from vernacular speech to movable type, to
photography, to paperback books, to videotape, to cable and pay-TV, to “900”
phone lines, to the French Minitel, to the Internet, to CD-ROMs and laser discs,
pornography has shown technology the way. “Great art is always flanked by its
dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography.”(5) The
same is true of the more mundane arts we call media. Where there is the
Gutenberg Bible, there is also Rabelais; where the U.S. mails, dirty postcards;
where the three-volume hardback novel, paperback pulp fiction; where HBO,
Midnight Blue; where CompuServe, the Plain Brown Wrapper
library

http://profile.yahoo.com/RKJ7YWF3WCLRHSWBDW3ETSYZIM Tommy John

Great article from the sheer curiosity of what it takes to run these requests across the the web. If you are working on something that requires you to handle massive amounts of data, and streaming etc. look for porn. :) I am not sure if I can get the IT guys to start opening up the firewall rules for research purposes. LOL

Anonymous

there are a lot of porn sites that is spreading like a wild fire. Some sites of them are just baby sites. just like http://porngun.com but you should try it!

Anonymous

Wow. This article is mind blowing. As someone who has spent countless hours viewing porn. I had no idea it was this large. This is a very distructive habit and is extremely hard to quit. But I’m doing it with God’s help. I’ve shown my 3 teenage boys this web site and have talked to them about the destructive side of porn. Hopefully they’ll be able to talk with me if they ever have a problem with it.

http://what-are-my-options.blogspot.com/ the99th

Now THAT… is a lot of masturbation.

http://abhi2point0.wordpress.com/ abhi 2.0

Great piece Seb! Though, why were you surprised that any cookie-based ad planner would underestimate the traffic? Didn’t all the modern browsers create the “porn mode” cookies-off option precisely for this kind of stuff?

Anonymous

cookies haven’t been the only way to collect stats for a long time. I don’t know about AdPlanner but other similar services use a combination of things to get data – clickstream data being one of them. Simply being in “porn mode” does nothing but not leave traces on the PC. I can still track you and see you when you hit my server. Anyone more advanced can fingerprint your browser with the proper set up and a server script embedded in the page – like banks do to secure the sites and online banking process

http://www.facebook.com/SoftwareJunction TheSoftware Junction

so much porn ..so little time . LOL

http://www.facebook.com/SoftwareJunction TheSoftware Junction

so much porn ..so little time . LOL

http://www.facebook.com/SoftwareJunction TheSoftware Junction

so much porn ..so little time . LOL

Michael Xie

It’s not universal that if you want a fast internet connection you watch porn. I want a fast internet connection so I can torrent quickly, and so I can game with no lag.

Werner Stapela

I’m curious about the monetization of all this activity and traffic. Does anyone know (Seb, Jude?) how much revenue this actually generates, the nature of the revenue (advertising, video sales, subscriptions, etc.), and how profitable that revenue is when considering the costs?
It would be interesting to compare that figure with lost productivity at say $ 5 per hour; i.e. if the consumers of the content had instead worked and earned $ 5 per hour.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

I don’t know personally, and I doubt anyone would give you a direct answer. But you could probably work backwards from the number of unique users a company gets (like AOL), and then divide that by their advertising income.

I find the images of racks full of servers almost as erotic as the porn they contain XD

http://profile.yahoo.com/U4K53YYZ6FFUOGVTXI2ZS5HJIU JOE

They need to categorize them. Not into obvious ones but something like 1. OMG! 2. Eeewww! 3. You can do that? 4. MY EYES! something of that nature.

heathkits

Porn has always driven technology – from .jpg to clustered servers. How soon before the highend desktop is designed for DIY porn animation with no Internet bandwidth required?

Amy C

Kayo Marbilus is number 1 for 2013

brothere Paul

It is a shame of the number of souls heading for Hell, where this kind of activity continues, only in pain and sorrow, because God is not there, only Satan, and his henchmen. Pray for all those souls who are in sin, before they pass into the wide gate leading to Hell. Amen

I think it would be interesting to make a review of http://www.porntie.com/ I saw that it is a new trend in porn sites.

jeson

可以说中文吗？

http://twitter.com/putasysexo putas

you can try some on this website http://rubias19.tv for me is one of the best with a clear difference can find everything

teaisstronger

WHO IS PAYING FOR ALL OF THIS FREE PORN?

NSA, CONGRESS, OBAMA?

albertadave

Porn has affected almost everybody’s life in ways you might not realize. Did you own a Beta Max or a HD DVD player..now rendered obsolete…The adult industry played a significant role, in each of the formats demise..

albertadave

Porn has affected almost everybody’s life in ways you might not realize. Did you own a Beta Max or a HD DVD player..now rendered obsolete…The adult industry played a significant role, in each of the formats demise..

jim dyar

i don’t know. i don’t spend time measuring it ;)

pmaster

If you check any porn
content aggregator site like http://www.epichardcore.com/ you will be seeing
what combined database of all sex videos is really huge. It’s almost 10
millions of free videos in the internet at the moment. Let’s think what every
video size approximate 5-10mb. So it means what all porn tubes have at least 5
peto bytes of storage.

nice discussion but i know an site that have ranking of site… really
see please for me the http://mestre.art.br/ and the
i dont need recomended this site but i think awesome to discuss
sorry for my poor english but i say truth words

http://www.showbizspy.com Showbiz Spy

The funny thing is sites like this have to spend big money on servers but who cares they make millions off of advertising. I mean, how much did PornHub make last year in ad rev alone? I bet it is in the 100m plus range.

Camille1981

Today the Internet is flooded with loads of porn and crazy stuff you don’t wanna mess with. The most safe thing to do while searching new porn is using a review site like http://theporndude.com/ this way you make sure your get at least some decent quality porn in safety. Just my 2cents.

Russia just now shut down Pornhub and Youporn again for like the 3rd time. However it is not like there is not another 1000 of them to take their place out there. Celebrity sex seems to be the biggest still and of course the Kim Kardashian tape is still the queen as the most download adult video of all time. You can read about her video and all the updates here: http://www.showbizspy.com/sex-tapes/kim-kardashian-full-sex-tape-porn-video/